Chapter 12 - Industry and the North, 1790s-1840s

12.1: The Transportation Revolution

• Travel on the road for much of the year in 1800 was difficult.
• Spring mud, summer dust and winter snow all made it uncomfy, slow and sometimes dangerous to travel by horseback or carriage.
• Shipments were too slow and costly on a road for bulky goods like grain.
  • Transportation across the Atlantic Sea and in the Mississippi-Ohio River system was much more affordable and still a major commercial link.
• The most striking thing was that all these changes in transport were still to come.
  • New railways in 1830 grew to an incredible 31,000 miles by 1860.
• The new transportation facility stimulated economic growth through the availability of remote markets.
  • Stranger investors were responsible for the shocking achievements of innovations such as channels and railroads, leading to further growth

12.2: The Market Revolution

• The market revolution was the result of three interlinked developments, the most fundamental change that American communities ever had experienced: rapid transport improvements, commercialization and industrialization.
• Buston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and others, the commercial community in the Northern States was largely comprised of merchants from the seafront towns.
• In the beginning, the American business community invested in, and thus expanded and transforms, not machinery and mills, but the "production system" of home manufacture.

12.3: The Yankee West

• The impact on the Old Northwest was shocking from the transport revolution.
  • Settlement of the region has accelerated and shifted considerably since the 1790s.
  • Prior to 1830, most migrants traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike or the National Road to the south of the region.
• The long life of the colonial New England and the early Ohio Valley before 1830 was replaced by commercial agriculture, boosted by transportation and government policy.
• The changing fortunes of major cities in the region show the dramatic effects of transport improvements.

12.4: Industrialization Begins

• In distinct contrast to the system of putting out capitalist systems work in many individual households required industrialization to focus factories and pace the power-driven machinery's rhythms themselves.
• In 1810 a young Bostonian, Francis Cabot Lowell, visited British textile mills seemingly casual in his intention of designing better machinery.
• Small rural spinning mills, built on the model of Slater's first mill on quick-running streams in proximity of existing farm communities, were much more common in early industrialization days.
  • Since smaller mill owners often employed whole families, their activities were referred to as family mills
  • It was unique to Lowell.
• The concept of interchangeable parts, first realized in the production of weapons, was so extraordinary that the British soon called this the "American manufacturing system."

12.5: From Artisan to Worker

• 97 percent of Americans still lived on farm when Lowell began operation, and most work was done in or near the house.

• A large increase in productivity, which the principles of division of employment and specialisation made possible, destroyed the apprenticeship system.

  • Factory workers gradually adapted to the sound of the factory bell to regulate their lives but were not necessarily the docile "hands" they wanted.

• The transformation of a largely trading system into cash payments was another effect of the market revolution.

• Some of the first strikes in the history of American labor were led by women workers.

  • In 1824 the women workers of Pawtucket, Rhode Island and textiles factories led their coworkers, both male and female, to protest the wage cuts and for long hours in one of these first actions.

  

12.6: The New Middle Class

• Social divisions had always occurred in America. Since the beginning of colonial times, plantationists in the south and businessmen in the north were a rich elite
• Since the 1790s, religion, which has undergone significant changes, was instrumental in the creation of new behaviour.
  • In the middle class and ultimately throughout society, the economic changes in the market revolution reshaped family roles.
• In the preindustrial household, children were shared with their fathers to learn agriculture or craft skills while the girls learned their moms' home skills.
• The new middle class took attitudes that match its new social roles, just as factory workers were compelled by the nature of their work to develop new attitudes.